The Virgin-Birth of Our Lord eBook

PREFACE

This paper was read before the S. T. C. (Sanctae Trinitatis
Confraternitas) on March 10th of this years at one
of the ordinary meetings of the Brotherhood.
It is published now in the hope that it may thus reach
a wider circle.

To suppose that any one can hold the Catholic doctrine
of the Incarnation without believing the miraculous
Conception and Birth, is, in the writer’s opinion,
a delusion. There is no trace in Church History,
so far as he is aware, of any believers in the Incarnation
who were not also believers in the Virgin-Birth.
The modern endeavour to divorce the one from the other
appears to be part of the attempt now being made to
get rid of the miraculous altogether from Christianity.

Professor Harnack appears to urge us to accept the
“Easter message” while we need not, he
thinks, believe the “Easter faith."* He means
apparently by this that we can deny the literal fact
of our Lord’s Resurrection, while we may believe
in a future life. What St. Paul would really
have said to a Christianity such as this seems to
be plain from his words to the Corinthian converts
who were denying the Resurrection in his day:
“If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching
vain, and your faith is also vain.” (I
Cor. xv. 14.)

—­ * Harnack, What is Christianity? p.
160. —­

Deny the Resurrection of our Lord, and you take away
the key-stone from the Apostolic preaching, and the
whole edifice falls to the ground. Any unprejudiced
reader of the sermons and speeches of St. Peter and
St. Paul in the Acts will surely recognize how true
this is.

Similarly in regard to the human Birth of our Lord.
Once admit that He was born as other men, and the
Incarnation fades away. A child born naturally
of human parents can never be God Incarnate.
There can be no new start given to humanity by such
a birth. The entail of original sin would not
be cut off nor could the Christ so born be described
as the “Second Adam—­the Lord from
heaven.” Christians could not look to such
a one as their Redeemer or Saviour, still less as
the Author to them of a new spiritual life.

Another man would have appeared among men, giving
mankind the example of a beautiful human life, but
unable in any other way to benefit the race of men.
Further, a Christ such as this would not be a perfect
character, for if the Gospels are to be believed,
He said things about Himself and made claims which
no thoroughly good man could have a right to make
unless he were immeasurably more than man. While
these pages were passing through the press, the eye
of the present writer was caught by the following words
in a letter of Bishop Westcott, which seem to have
a special significance at this time:—­“I
tried vainly to read——­’s book
.... He seems to me to deny the Virgin-Birth.
In other words, he makes the Lord a man, one man in
the race, and not the new Man—­the Son of
Man, in whom the race is gathered up. To put the
thought in another and a technical form, he makes
the Lord’s personality human, which is, I think,
a fatal error."*